The Hunted Woman Part 3

"That much--for words," he went on. "Now I'm going to give you the visual demonstration. I know your game, Bill. You're already planning what you're going to do. You won't fight fair--because you never have. You've already decided that some morning I'll turn up missing, or be dug out from under a fall of rock, or go peacefully floating down the Athabasca. See! There's nothing in that hand, is there?"

He stretched out an empty hand toward them, palm up.

"And now!"

A twist of the wrist so swift their eyes could not follow, a metallic click, and the startled group were staring into the black muzzle of a menacing little automatic.

"That's known as the sleeve trick, boys," explained Aldous with his imperturbable smile. "It's a relic of the old gun-fighting days when the best man was quickest. From now on, especially at night, I shall carry this little friend of mine just inside my wristband. There are eleven shots in it, and I shoot fairly straight. Good-day!"

Before they had recovered from their astonishment he was gone.

He did not follow the road along which Joanne had come a short time before, but turned again into the winding trail that led riverward through the poplars. Where before he had been a little amused at himself, he was now more seriously disgusted. He was not afraid of Quade, who was perhaps the most dangerous man along the line of rail. Neither was he afraid of the lawless men who worked his ends. But he knew that he had made powerful enemies, and all because of an unknown woman whom he had never seen until half an hour before. It was this that disturbed his equanimity--the _woman_ of it, and the knowledge that his interference had been unsolicited and probably unnecessary. And now that he had gone this far he found it not easy to recover his balance. Who was this Joanne Gray? he asked himself.

She was not ordinary--like the hundred other women who had gone on ahead of her to Tete Jaune Cache. If she had been that, he would soon have been in his little shack on the sh.o.r.e of the river, hard at work. He had planned work for himself that afternoon, and he was nettled to discover that his enthusiasm for the grand finale of a certain situation in his novel was gone. Yet for this he did not blame her. He was the fool. Quade and his friends would make him feel that sooner or later.

His trail led him to a partly dry muskeg bottom. Beyond this was a thicker growth of timber, mostly spruce and cedar, from behind which came the rus.h.i.+ng sound of water. A few moments more and he stood with the wide tumult of the Athabasca at his feet. He had chosen this spot for his little cabin because the river ran wild here among the rocks, and because pack-outfits going into the southward mountains could not disturb him by fording at this point. Across the river rose the steep embankments that shut in Buffalo Prairie, and still beyond that the mountains, thick with timber rising billow on billow until trees looked like twigs, with gray rock and glistening snow shouldering the clouds above the last purple line.

The cabin in which he had lived and worked for many weeks faced the river and the distant Saw Tooth Range, and was partly hidden in a clump of jack-pines. He opened the door and entered. Through the window to the south and west he could see the white face of Mount Geikie, and forty miles away in that wilderness of peaks, the sombre frown of Hardesty; through it the sun came now, flooding his work as he had left it. The last page of ma.n.u.script on which he had been working was in his typewriter. He sat down to begin where he had left off in that pivotal situation in his masterpiece.

He read and re-read the last two or three pages of the ma.n.u.script, struggling to pick up the threads where he had dropped them. With each reading he became more convinced that his work for that afternoon was spoiled. And by whom? By _what?_ A little fiercely he packed his pipe with fresh tobacco. Then he leaned back, lighted it, and laughed. More and more as the minutes pa.s.sed he permitted himself to think of the strange young woman whose beauty and personality had literally projected themselves into his workshop. He marvelled at the crudity of the questions which he asked himself, and yet he persisted in asking them. Who was she? What could be her mission at Tete Jaune Cache? She had repeated to him what she had said to the girl in the coach--that at Tete Jaune she had no friends. Beyond that, and her name, she had offered no enlightenment.

In the brief s.p.a.ce that he had been with her he had mentally tabulated her age as twenty-eight--no older. Her beauty alone, the purity of her eyes, the freshness of her lips, and the slender girlishness of her figure, might have made him say twenty, but with those things he had found the maturer poise of the woman. It had been a flashlight picture, but one that he was sure of.

Several times during the next hour he turned to his work, and at last gave up his efforts entirely. From a peg in the wall he took down a little rifle. He had found it convenient to do much of his own cooking, and he had broken a few laws. The partridges were out of season, but temptingly fat and tender. With a brace of young broilers in mind for supper, he left the cabin and followed the narrow foot-trail up the river. He hunted for half an hour before he stirred a covey of birds. Two of these he shot.

Concealing his meat and his gun near the trail he continued toward the ford half a mile farther up, wondering if Stevens, who was due to cross that day, had got his outfit over. Not until then did he look at his watch. He was surprised to find that the Tete Jaune train had been gone three quarters of an hour. For some unaccountable reason he felt easier. He went on, whistling.

At the ford he found Stevens standing close to the river's edge, twisting one of his long red moustaches in doubt and vexation.

"d.a.m.n this river," he growled, as Aldous came up. "You never can tell what it's going to do overnight. Look there! Would you try to cross?"

"I wouldn't," replied Aldous. "It's a foot higher than yesterday. I wouldn't take the chance."

"Not with two guides, a cook, and a horse-wrangler on your pay-roll--and a hospital bill as big as Geikie staring you in the face?" argued Stevens, who had been sick for three months. "I guess you'd pretty near take a chance. I've a notion to."

"I wouldn't," repeated Aldous.

"But I've lost two days already, and I'm taking that bunch of sightseers out for a lump sum, guaranteeing 'em so many days on the trail. This ain't what you might call _on the trail_. They don't expect to pay for this delay, and that outfit back in the bush is costing me thirty dollars a day.

We can get the dunnage and ourselves over in the flat-boat. It'll make our arms crack--but we can do it. I've got twenty-seven horses. I've a notion to chase 'em in. The river won't be any lower to-morrow."

"But you may be a few horses ahead."

Stevens bit off a chunk of tobacco and sat down. For a few moments he looked at the muddy flood with an ugly eye. Then he chuckled, and grinned.

"Came through the camp half an hour ago," he said. "Hear you cleaned up on Bill Quade."

"A bit," said Aldous.

Stevens rolled his quid and spat into the water slus.h.i.+ng at his feet.

"Guess I saw the woman when she got off the train," he went on. "She dropped something. I picked it up, but she was so darned pretty as she stood there looking about I didn't dare go up an' give it to her. If it had been worth anything I'd screwed up my courage. But it wasn't--so I just gawped like the others. It was a piece of paper. Mebby you'd like it as a souvenir, seein' as you laid out Quade for her."

As he spoke, Stevens fished a crumpled bit of paper from his pocket and gave it to his companion. Aldous had sat down beside him. He smoothed the page out on his knee. There was no writing on it, but it was crowded thick with figures, as if the maker of the numerals had been doing some problem in mathematics. The chief thing that interested him was that wherever monetary symbols were used it was the "pound" and not the "dollar" sign.

The totals of certain columns were rather startling.

"Guess she's a millionaire if that's her own money she's been figgering,"

said Stevens. "Notice that figger there!" He pointed with a stubby forefinger. "Pretty near a billion, ain't it?"

"Seven hundred and fifty thousand," said Aldous.

He was thinking of the "pound" sign. She had not looked like the Englishwomen he had met. He folded the slip of paper and put it in his pocket.

Stevens eyed him seriously.

"I was coming over to give you a bit of advice before I left for the Maligne Lake country," he said. "You'd better move. Quade won't want you around after this. Besides----"

"What?"

"My kid heard something," continued the packer, edging nearer. "You was mighty good to the kid when I was down an' out, Aldous. I ought to tell you. It wasn't an hour ago the kid was behind the tent an' he heard Quade and Slim Barker talking. So far as I can find from the kid, Quade has gone nutty over her. He's ravin'. He told Slim that he'd give ten thousand dollars to get her in his hands. What sent the boy down to me was Quade tellin' Slim that he'd get _you_ first. He told Slim to go on to Tete Jaune--follow the girl!"

"The deuce you say!" cried Aldous, clutching the other's arm suddenly.

"He's done that?"

"That's what the kid says."

Aldous rose to his feet slowly. The careless smile was playing about his mouth again. A few men had learned that in those moments John Aldous was dangerous.

"The kid is undoubtedly right," he said, looking down at Stevens. "But I am quite sure the young woman is capable of taking care of herself. Quade has a tremendous amount of nerve, setting Slim to follow her, hasn't he? Slim may run up against a husband or a brother."

Stevens haunched his shoulders.

"It's not the woman I'm thinking about. It's you. I'd sure change my location."

"Why wouldn't it be just as well if I told the police of his threat?" asked Aldous, looking across the river with a glimmer of humour in his eyes.

"Oh, h.e.l.l!" was the packer's rejoinder.

Slowly he unwound his long legs and rose to his feet.

"Take my advice--move!" he said. "As for me, I'm going to cross that cussed river this afternoon or know the reason why."

He stalked away in the direction of his outfit, chewing viciously at his quid. For a few moments Aldous stood undecided. He would liked to have joined the half-dozen men he saw lounging restfully a distance beyond the grazing ponies. But Stevens had made him acutely aware of a new danger. He was thinking of his cabin--and the priceless achievement of his last months of work, his ma.n.u.script. If Quade should destroy that----

He clenched his hands and walked swiftly toward his camp. To "burn out" an enemy was one of Quade's favourite methods of retaliation. He had heard this. He also knew that Quade's work was done so cleverly that the police had been unable to call him to account.

Quade's status had interested Aldous from the beginning. He had discovered that Quade and Culver Rann, his partner at Tete Jaune, were forces to be reckoned with even by the "powers" along the line of rail. They were the two chiefs of the "underground," the men who controlled the most dangerous element from Miette to Fort George. He had once seen Culver Rann, a quiet, keen-eyed, immaculately groomed man of forty--the cleverest scoundrel that had ever drifted into the Canadian west. He had been told that Rann was really the brain of the combination, and that the two had picked up a quarter of a million in various ways. But it was Quade with whom he had to deal now, and he began to thank Stevens for his warning. He was filled with a sense of relief when he reached his cabin and found it as he had left it. He always made a carbon copy of his work. This copy he now put into a waterproof tin box, and the box he concealed under a log a short distance back in the bush.

"Now go ahead, Quade," he laughed to himself, a curious, almost exultant ring in his voice. "I haven't had any real excitement for so long I can't remember, and if you start the fun there's going to _be_ fun!"

He returned to his birds, perched himself behind a bush at the river's edge, and began skinning them. He had almost finished when he heard hoa.r.s.e shouts from up the river. From his position he could see the stream a hundred yards below the ford. Stevens had driven in his horses. He could see them breasting the first sweep of the current, their heads held high, struggling for the opposite sh.o.r.e. He rose, dropped his birds, and stared.

"Good G.o.d, what a fool!" he gasped.